1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer device, a printing method, a printing program, and a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a demand for a system that allows certain users to use shared office equipment such as printers provided in an office, and charges each user or department according to the frequency of use.
To satisfy such a demand, a system that restricts users through the combination of a printer and software installed in a personal computer (hereinafter referred to simply as PC) has been provided (see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Nos. 2003-276281 and 2002-373073, for example).
As for the charging, a special accounting device or the like has been used.
However, the above conventional technique has the problem that the user restriction and the account management are not efficiently conducted.
So as to solve this problem, an authentication unit that authenticates office equipment such as printers is employed. Based on user authentication information or the like added to the print job, the authentication unit performs user authentication. A user restricting operation and an account managing operation may be efficiently performed in view of the user authentication and the authority of authenticated users.
When a PC generates a print job for a printer, a module called a printer driver that is provided by a printer vender is normally used. Therefore, the addition of user authentication information or the like to a print job is performed by a printer driver.
However, there are many cases where the modules for generating print jobs are produced by a system other than a printer vendor, such as CAD (Computer Aided Design) applications, direct print applications with PDF (Portable Document Format), or systems formed with mainframes. In such cases, it is not necessarily easy to add user authentication information or the like to a print job.
Therefore, with a conventional printer, a user restricting operation and an account managing operation cannot be efficiently performed for CAD applications, direct printing applications with PDF, and systems formed with mainframes.